The Right Kind of ‘Overwork’ Is Underrated
Overwork is the 21st century counterpart of productivity. In the modern world of workforce “having it all” is the name of the game. You should be able to work and have a “balanced” life. Travelling could be a part of your yearly regimen. Flexi hours is even the new advocate for modern, healthy work lifestyle.
As a woman in business, I am not against all these. I scoured my way through modern work that has limited boundaries to achieve a certain kind of work-life balance.
However, one thing I learned from Margaret Meloni, MBA, during a University of California, Irvine Extension course is that you never truly achieve a work-life balance. You can feel peaceful with the daily schedules you have but it will never come down to an exact 50–50 distribution. But that is not the main point here.
I’m not endorsing strenuous work where you do not sleep, eat or drink. However, because of the over-commercialized notion of “work-life” balance, people forget that there is value in overwork — the right kind of overwork.
In school, we were trained to do homework. For high achieving students, they even spend more time to do advance course work. In sports, athletes wake up at 5 or 6 in the morning to begin their exercise. Throughout the day, they continue their training program and even do a couple of sets before the day ends.
The same goes in business and in work. In any workforce environment, anyone is bound to meet a distraction. There’s a ping from the manager to remind you for Project A. There’s the co-worker asking you for feedback. You also have this nagging feeling to check your email and on top of that, social media calls are also in demand.
In an 8-hour work shift, there are so many things happening that what you really a lot in the “actual” work is less than four hours. Therefore, after work hours, we still find ourselves with even more work to do: the ones that should have been done today and the preparation for the work to anticipate tomorrow.
What we are looking for is focus.
Author and Georgetown University professor Cal Newport is an enthusiast and researcher of deep work. Newport acknowledges the fact that our modern world offers too much distraction that the value of our work gets affected. Continuous stream of focus is very hard to achieve.
According to Newport, deep work means “the act of focusing without distraction on a cognitively demanding task.”
He believes that “deep work is like a superpower in our current economy.” If you can apply this, you are already ahead of everyone else.
This kind of deep work is not actually new. Great, creative masters of the past know that they need at least 4 hours of undisturbed work to manifest their full potential. Even the inventor and painter Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was known to have 4 hours of straight work. After his straight bursts of focus, he would take 20 minutes of nap to reboot his entire system. It’s called the Uberman polyphasic sleep cycle.
For people who achieve this “in the zone” moment for more than 4 hours, they usually go in a stage where they are no longer aware of time. This is where modern overwork usually associates with.
If you are in this zone, do not interrupt the flow. Let the burst of creativity and focus stream through your work. It is actually harder to get back to this state once you have broken the continuous effort. This is what I would call the right kind of overwork.
When you experience this, you ignore time boundaries. You even forget to eat or you can stay up all night even if you usually go to bed early. The reason why I advocate for not interrupting these kinds of moments is because you do not necessarily experience this every single day. The way to “balance” this overwork is to listen to your body. Did you feel hungry? Are you sleepy? Then, grab a bite. Go to sleep, especially when nothing of value is being added to the work.
To give you the contrast, the wrong kind of overwork would be not eating when you are hungry to the bones and you can no longer focus because you are crunching in pain. The wrong kind of overwork could also be staying up until 3 in the morning when you are too exhausted to work. You are just there looking at the blueprint with no creative ideas running through your head. This is the wrong kind of overwork.
The key here is naturally listening to what your body tells you. If it is “in the zone” and it is ready to provide long hours of focus, do not let the moment fly and just do it. If your body tells you it needs a break, go do it. Our biological senses are very powerful. Use that to your advantage.
We get too bound by the 8-hour work shift that the essence of deep work is getting lost in the way. Try applying this method and see how it improves the value of your outputs.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Pat Villaceran is an eclectic social entrepreneur. She creates social enterprises that empower multi-fold impact on economy, society, and environment. She’s also passionate about equality, human rights and the plight of emerging markets.
Pat’s non-fiction publications focus on the introspection of the mind and how human beings are able to achieve the impossible. She surmises findings from scientific researches, extraordinary life examples into the life-changing philosophical ethos she writes in her books.
For more information on her upcoming and latest releases, follow Pat on her social media accounts.
